On Tradition, Common Sense and Conspiracies

The contributions that make this small volume so precious are the very fruitful insights that arose during those seminars, representing an important toolbox for those who are interested in gaining insights into the tactics and strategies employed by contemporary populist radical-right parties and far-right parties. In fact, it is here of the utmost relevance to note that, also in virtue of such well-conceived and employed devices, the extreme right no longer represents a circumscribed sphere or a galaxy per se, still dangerous yet “confined” and “under control”, so to speak (Ignazi 1994, Mudde 2019). In fact, many of the conspiracy theories, beliefs, opinions, and ideologies associated with the extreme right (Griffini 2023; Orofino and Allchorn 2023) that were thought to have been relegated to the past, are today not only more alive than ever, but almost perfectly welded within the conservative mainstream (in some cases even referred to as moderate)2 and are an integral part of contemporary political science thinking (Palano 2023).  Last year, in the co-edited book based on the first edition of international seminars and entitled Populism and Far Right: Trends in Europe (2022), we encountered the following topics: the far right’s use in Germany and the UK of media vehicles to channel hate towards official institutions and immigrants through discourses that are socially accepted as “truth”, and the Spanish far-right’s spectacularisation of politics on social media; the link between the contemporary mainstreaming of the European far right and the environment, including the debate on ecofascism, right-wing ecology, far-right ecologism and green nationalism; the role of ideological flexibility in Italy’s and France’s populist parties and the electoral consequences of ambiguity, and the role of public Euroscepticism in Southern, Eastern and Western Europe. This year, beyond the numerous electoral victories (as in Italy), the real result at the political level has been a gradual but unstoppable convergence among the right-leaning of the political spectrum. That convergence is in fact a two-way process that has occurred both (a) with the extreme right going mainstream and (b) the ‘moderate’ right radicalising. The result is that it is now very difficult to distinguish where one ends or the other begins. Another equally important element is that this gradual but continuous process of interpenetration between centre-right and far right, often labelled as conservative, represents fertile ground for an overall ideological shift increasingly to the right (Bruno 2023).